


Points of infinite multiplicity

by JaqofSpades



Category: NCIS, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Community: wishlist_fic, F/M, wishlist 2013
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-01-05 18:25:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1097197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Point the first: a muddy field in Vietnam.  Point the second: an NCIS autopsy table.  Known variable: the mutant formerly known as Victor Creed.  Unknown variables: a beautiful young mutant, her ageless lover, and the shocking realisation that the team's resident genius may have divided loyalties.  Leroy Jethro Gibbs plays connect the dots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Point the first

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Viking_Princess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viking_Princess/gifts).



> A/N: a wishlist_fic (2013) for Viking Princess, to the prompt: Abby+any agents/Rogue, Wolverine, Gambit. “It was so much easier when mutants officially weren't allowed in the military.” Deplorably late and not yet complete; here's hoping peer pressure will do the trick :D

Gibbs stared at the man on the slab, and let his mind spin free. Dead. Definitely dead. But no injuries. No discernible cause of death. And no identity whatsoever.

But something was nagging him. Telling him to look again, to keep looking, even though every possible lead had been followed. But still ...

He was missing something. He knew it in his gut. Somewhere deep inside, primitive and instinctual. 

And just like that, he is back in a hole, on a muddy field in Vietnam.

'Gibbs! Get your fucking head down, boy! Crawl outta that corner or that's where you die!" 

Hell is raining down from every-fucking-where, and he can't see for the smoke, but Sarge is heckling him into just running, just picking up his weapon and sprinting for the position they're holding. He makes it, too, and hunkers down, looking about for the rest of their unit.

"Didn't make it," comes the voice from the darkest corner, utterly apathetic. Creed is slouched against the wall, boots off, body relaxed, as if he's camping with the folks. He's gnawing on some sort of bone, sharp teeth glinting in the light, and Gibbs shudders at the sense of wrong that comes rushing off him.

He turns back towards the light, only to catch Sarge watching him carefully, nostrils flaring. Technically, Major Creed is in charge, but this is the man they all follow, dogged and dangerous like his namesake, the Wolverine. Might not talk much, but he'll bring you home, the boys had told him. 'Course, they were all dead now. Gibbs can feel the panic rising again, threatening to steal away whatever bravery he has left, but something about those yellow eyes in the halflight - he lifts his head and meets them head on. He is being weighed somehow, he knows.

And when the question 'by what?' floats through his head, he dismisses it as unworthy. 

By what, indeed, he thinks sourly as he inspects Victor Creed's unchanged face. To be fair, he's never seen it so shaven or kempt, but the heavy jaw, the sharp teeth - it's Creed, alright.

But how did a feral superhealer get himself killed on a Navy ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? Especially when no one knew who he was or what he was doing there?

Alarm prickles up his spine and he's dialling SecNav even before he has exited the morgue. Protocol can go screw itself. This is an emergency.

*

"I knew him as Victor Creed. More than 30 years ago," Gibbs explains. "He looked exactly like this 30 years ago. He ... heals."

His emphasis is not lost on any of listeners, and if he didn't have better things to do, he'd be amused by the range of reactions. The Secretary of the Navy looks affronted, and Commander Joshua downright dumbfounded. Leon Vance is already flipping through his mental Rolodex (who in blazes did you call in this situation?) and his team is various shades of perplexed.

"You allow mutants in the US military forces?" Ziva asks cautiously, and Tony smiles proudly at her attempt at tact. Everyone knew mutants had been fighting under various flags for years - to officially acknowledge their existence was different thing altogether.

McGee looks like he's been given some sort of puzzle to decode, and Ducky is lost in an 'of course!' moment. Only Abby looks out of sorts.

Abby looks scared, he realises slowly.

Abby looks scared, and he doesn't know why, and something in him finds both of those facts unacceptable.

*

"Abs?"

She has her back to him but her shoulders are so tense he can almost feel the ache. They rise even more when he speaks, and he hates himself for doing that to her.

"What can I do for you, Gibbs?"

He guides her over to the beanbag in the far corner of the lab. He'd scoffed when she made the request, but no one denies Abby spends more time in the lab than most people do in bed. So if she wanted a giant beanbag ... a giant beanbag she got.

"Sit."

"It's the middle of the day, Gibbs! I have work to do!"

"Sit."

"Technically, Gibbs, you don't 'sit' in a beanbag. You slouch. Sprawl. Relax," she says sharply. "None of which I have time for right now."

"Make time, Abs." 

She glares at him, then sinks to the floor, leaning back on her elbows to stare up at him, long legs crossed jauntily at the knee. He doesn't look away quickly enough, and that's all it takes to dump him right back to the one place he has been trying to avoid of late. 

"Sit, Gibbs," she says, patting the beanbag next to her, red lips curling into a catlike smile.

He eyes the far corner of the beanbag, and weighs the need to find out what's bugging her with the advisability of getting close to his too-tempting lab genius. Ten years, they've been working together, and the problem with ten years? He knows she's all grown up, and she knows exactly how to hit his triggers.

(His triggers have changed, since he met Abby. He remembers wondering why a pretty girl would spoil the picture with combat boots and tattoos. Now, he thinks the picture is perfect, and some days, she takes his breath away.)

Today, she's a feast of dark red and shiny black, from her lips to her fingernails to the tiny little skirt that should never have been allowed near a beanbag, he realises with a wince. But it was his idea, so backing down isn't and option and ... there. He tries to hold himself away from her, but it's like trying to sit on dry sand, her pull absolutely inescapable.

"I knew him before," he starts. "He wasn't a good guy, Abs. Not because he's a mutant, though that was plenty freaky at the time but - him. There was just something off about him."

She's not looking at him, but she's too still not to be listening.

"Saw him die, more'n once. His brother, too. But after a coupla' hours, they'd just shake it right off. Powerful mutation."

She shivers involuntarily, and mutters something that sounds like "bloody ferals."

It's an old, polished epithet, he realises. Something she's thought for a long time.

"Known a few, Abs?"

She buries her face in her hands for a moment, rubbing violently at her eyes to summon the chi energy she loves. It gives her courage, she claims. Purpose.

"Yeah. There's this place I spent time in for a while. A special high school. You should send someone there to ask about him."

Her eyes go distant for a moment, and a shudder passes over her skin. "Not many people that can kill a superhealer. But ... there's one woman who could."

Abby took a deep breath as if just revealing the information hurt. "Ask for Rogue." 

*

"Agents David and Gibbs, NCIS," Ziva informed the security monitor with a flash of her badge, and the massive gates slid open to admit to them to the estate.

Abby's school, it turns out, is quite the interesting place. The glossy brochures hardly did justice to the magnificent grounds of 1407 Greymalkin Lane. Nor did they mention anything about the real purpose of The Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. The FBI was adamant it was a smokescreen for a paramilitary force called the X-men, recruiting from the cream of the nation's mutant talent - students at the school.

He hadn't pressed Abby for information; it was obvious she was uncomfortable with being thought anything other than normal. He had asked about the school, and Rogue, and she hadn't wanted to answer. He'd never had cause to doubt her loyalty to NCIS before.

"I don't know her real name, Gibbs!" she had exploded. "She kept to herself, okay. There was a lot of gossip about what she could do, but no real evidence - all I know is that she just had to brush up against you, even by accident, and in ten or fifteen seconds you'd be out cold. Or dead."

He'd made a small sound of disbelief and she had thrown her hands in the air in disgust. "It was something about her skin - maybe a toxin, maybe an electrical charge. I don't know! All I know is that she was sad, and lonely, and we were all so scared of her no one said boo to her."

Abby had looked away then, and shook her head. "I still hate myself for not trying to be her friend. Imagine being a freak among freaks. Poor thing. No wonder she went mad."

Ziva drew the car up under a portico on the circular drive, and they had barely rung the doorbell before a small Asian woman flung it open.

"Hi. Welcome to Xavier's. I'm Jubilation Lee. Public Relations. And other stuff!" she beamed, her sheer exuberance making Gibbs blink in surprise. They hadn't been expecting a warm welcome. They hadn't been expecting any sort of welcome at all.

"Uh - Special Agent Gibbs, and this is Agent David. NCIS."

"Ooh, yes. Naval Criminal Investigative Service - we hadn't heard of you. But we read up!" she told them, sounding thrilled with the idea.

Ziva shot him an alarmed glance and Gibbs shrugged minutely before returning his attention to the alarmingly bubbly Miss Lee.

"Why? Were you expecting a visit from us for some reason?"

Miss Lee raised her eyebrows at him. "Duh. We're mutants. Right now we've got two timebenders, three paths and half a dozen precogs in the Mansion. Probably knew you were coming before you did! You want to see Rogue, right?"

Gibbs nodded mutely and motioned for Ziva to precede him into the sumptuously decorated hall.

"She's waiting in the library," Miss Lee chirped. "Follow me!"

The library, it turned out, was past the dining hall ("usually only a hundred or so kids, but we can feed 500 if we have to, the conferences you know, or just big parties - we entertain a lot!") and a string of classrooms ("all your standard high school syllabi plus advanced classes in disciplines of interest to our students - lot of our kids are gifted in more than one direction, so we need to feed 'em right.")

He wonders later if it's a conscious strategy, that remorseless wall of chatter. It makes the quiet of the library a blessed relief, and he and Ziva are so busy drinking in the silence, they fail to notice the woman curled up at one end of the huge Chesterfield.

And then Gibbs is too busy staring at the man rubbing her feet to notice anything else at all.

*


	2. Point the second

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So is there a record for the longest time between posted chapters? I probably get that, I know. But this story is on the boil now, right at the top of my list of priorities. I promise!

The Wolverine lifts his head slowly, pinning them with a hostile stare so full of threat that Gibbs freezes. He tries to take a step forward as his former Sergeant unfolds himself from the sofa, but something inside of him screams not to. He doesn't even reach for his ID the way he normally would. 

Howlett – the Sarge – prowls towards them, and Gibbs doesn't even breathe. His body remembers not to confront this man, he realises slowly. He's older now, wiser to so many things, but somehow, his younger self had figured it out. Something other than a man lurked behind those yellow eyes, and to that animal, everything else was either predator, or prey.

Better to be prey, his instincts yell. Prey might be allowed to live.

Even as his entire body yells danger, he recognises the weird feeling bubbling in his chest as anticipation. As if he's ten years old, Gibbs thinks wryly as he waits for his hero to recognise him. To the kid who had seen his friends die in that godforsaken place, the man who got him out was Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali and General fucking Patton all rolled into one. Investigation or no investigation, all he wants is the chance to shake his hand again.

But there's still no recognition in the man's uncanny yellow eyes. Only hostility. Pure amber hate that slams into him like a fist to the gut.

Something's wrong, he realises slowly. Is it him – did he somehow get it wrong? The fact that the man is a carbon copy of the soldier he'd known 40 years ago … could it be something else, another mutant thing altogether? But it's not just roughcut face, or the way he moves – he is the Sarge, right down to the way his nostrils flare as he sniffs the air, and the dogtags that hang around his neck.

"Wolverine," he blurts, gauche as the boy he used to be. His brain, though, is processing it. They'd all been brothers, but Howlett and Creed had shared blood. One dead on the slab, and the other here, unchanged. Ferals, Abby had called them. He should have asked about that. Especially with those narrowed, yellow eyes dripping menace into the room. 

Gibbs can feel Ziva moving beside him, muscles loose and ready to strike. He skims a careful hand down her arm in a mute request to stand down.

Howlett follows the exchange and sneers. “Well don't you two just stink of the fucking military? Who the hell are you, bub?”

It could be a front, Gibbs calculates. Some sort of deep cover. But he's never met anyone who can fake the blank mistrust of true ignorance. And his voice – so raw and rough, bristling with sort of naked aggression that the man he knew had sneered at. “Threats are for men afraid to act,” the Sarge had said once, and it'd been one of the first entries on young Jethro's list of rules to live by.

But Gibbs can't shake the feeling he's staring at his hero, hidden underneath another man altogether. A cruel little voice is telling him the soldier he had known is gone, and this is the shell he left behind. A dangerous shell, he reminds himself as flips out his badge.

“Special Agent Jethro Gibbs. NCIS,” he offers. Still no recognition, so he sighs and accepts the need to elaborate. “The Naval Criminal Investigative Service. This is Agent David.”

Howlett looks Ziva over in a way that has Gibbs preparing for mayhem, but the woman standing behind him just rolls her eyes and shoves him out of the way.

“Sorry about the welcoming committee. I'm Rogue. You wanted to see me?”

Gibbs sighs at his own naivete in expecting they might have the element of surprise. “Yes, miss. We hoped you might be able to shed some light on a case we're investigating. A death on a navy vessel.”

He slides a photo of the corpse out of the envelope he's carrying and proffers it to the willowy brunette. She bows her head to look at it, and a lock of pure white hair untucks itself from behind her ear to shade her face. He'd wanted to see her reaction, dammit. Maybe that's why he stomps all over Rule Number 14.

“When did you last see your brother, Sergeant Howlett?”

The photograph slips from the girl's fingers as she turns to gape at the man behind her, mouth dropping open in astonishment. Everyone freezes as a metallic sound rings through the room, but it's not the familiar click of a cocked gun. It's the horrifying slide of blades from raw flesh, a wet snikt that turns his stomach even as his mind protests at the impossibility of it. He doesn't know much about mutations, sure, but … every part of his brain is screaming that it's wrong. Unnatural.

He slaps it away at first, the memory. Incongruous. But it was the first time he had felt it, that visceral sense of wrong, wrong, wrong. 

He was short and dapper, the officer that swung through their camp every few weeks. Perfectly pressed suit, tropical sun glinting off the golden rims on his glasses. Some sort of Colonel, but didn't bother to even glance at anyone other than Howlett or Creed. Not that the company minded. The Colonel watched them like a mongoose eyeing a snake, one part concern to two parts disgust. You could hear it in his voice, too, Gibbs remembers with a shudder.

He'd been a good twenty feet away from the mess tent, digging out the latrine, but scraps of their conversation had floated out nonetheless.

“Soldier … ferocity … healing … weaponised … perfect ...”

Creed had been grinning like a loon, but he'd caught the Sarge frowning and shaking his head, and he'd never heard him speak with such vehemence. “Perverted!” he'd snapped, and stomped out of there, letting Creed see the Colonel to his jeep. The two men had argued for days, afterward, and then, and then …

Everyone had died. Except him, and the two ferals.

It's the young woman's breathy voice that drags him back to the present, and he gives himself the mental equivalent of a slap as he realises they're virtually under attack. There's a low growl rolling through the room, like nothing he's ever heard, and she's moved to put herself between them, even as Ziva draws her gun.

“Logan, sugar. Put them away,” Howlett's girl pleads, one gloved hand stroking down his bare arm. “I don't think ...” she glances back to him, eyes huge in question.

None of them knows what to think, it's obvious. But they're off balance now, and he's pretty sure it's got nothing to do with the photograph of Creed. Problem is, he hasn't got a clue himself.

There's a wild pain in Howlett's eyes that suggests whatever Gibbs has managed to blunder into, it cuts deep. It still doesn't prepare him for the bewilderment of what comes next.

“You … you … you know who I am,” James Howlett stammers. “How? Who?”

“And where the fuck do you get off calling that animal my brother?”

*

She puts it off as long as she can. The particulates she's testing have proven inconclusive, the fibres don't come up as a match for anything in her personal database, let alone any of the official ones, and the autopsy results might as well be a big, fat zero.

Abby waits until there is nothing left for her to do, then locks herself in the clean room to cry. Too many memories. Too many regrets. So many years of denial.

And the first thing she does after coming back in contact with the mutant community? Send them after one of her own.

She might as well be fourteen again, hiding in plain sight. Not a mutant, of course not. Nothing you'll ever prove. Just a runaway. Smarter than most, perhaps. Able to run probabilities in her head, and taste likelihood and possible outcomes of a thousand different scenarios, and touch an object and know its provenance and a good deal of its past. But there's not a mark on her, nothing even vaguely unusual outside of the way her brain works. No way for them to tell.

And then Charles Xavier and his big round room barge into her life, seducing her with his labs and his college-level courses and his warm, safe beds. Showing her a place she could belong, a place she can thrive, once she unlocks who she really is. (Computation is just the start, Dr McCoy suspects. Develop her innate gifts a little, and her brain has the capacity to outstrip any supercomputer, his report had read. She'd had to destroy it, because it had her real name on it, but the part that had really stung was seeing it there in black and white, the name she'd chosen for herself.

Codex. 27.2415 days, she'd lived. After more than a year denying who she was, playing zany, human Abigail Adams to the hilt, then finally, finally taking that leap. Uniform, and training with the other juniors, and spending day after day in the lab jumping through Dr McCoy's hoops, bloodwork and psych and agility, physical and mental, all filed as Codex.

Never once knowing that the government's military monkeys were busy isolating the X-gene. Developing that abomination they called The Cure. Planning the raid on the mansion that would turn Xavier's kids into lab rats, and set her on a new path.

Murderer. Traitor. Born-again human, Abby Sciuto.

She's not sure what hurts most, now. The old shame, turning her back on the one place she'd ever belonged, or the new one.

She'd liked being Abby, until she saw it in his eyes. That flash of surprise and hurt as he realised she'd been hiding a part of herself from him. It was Gibbs who'd made life as Abby Sciuto bearable, she'd wanted to scream, even if she'd never been quite brave enough to do anything about it. But now, it's not enough.

He's flicked a switch she didn't even know existed, and she's doing it again. The mere memory of who she used to be has her logging his every reaction. Calculating every possible outcome. Inputting the variables, and identifying the tipping point.

Codex leaves nothing to chance, and she's already decided.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs is hers.


	3. Point the third

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's been a while since the last update. No, the next one won't take quite as long. Yes, I know exactly where this story is going now, and my plan is to finish it before the year is out. (No, nothing I say is binding :D)

Memory, Xavier had explained, is a house full of doors, some so well-oiled they slide open without effort, others stubborn and sticky with time.  Logan’s house is bigger than most, but he’s barely allowed past the front room – everything else is nailed shut.  Some of it, Wheels had admitted, is probably gone for good, lost to Stryker’s doctors and their careful regime of drug cocktails and torture.  
  
But every now and then, someone lets him peek through a window, and this – this is what that is, Logan tells himself as he skewers the photograph to stare.  An opportunity.  Information.  
  
_Sergeant Howlett … your brother …_  
  
He should be fucking rejoicing at the sight of Sabretooth on a slab, but instead he wants to slice whoever-the-fuck he said he was from stem to stern.  Pathetic little human with his too-calm voice and labyrinth of questions. It can’t possibly be true, he’d know, surely, he’d know, but ….  
  
He can’t remember anything beyond waking up in the snow fifteen years ago.  
  
And he knows more about you than you do, Logan flagellates himself into cooperation.  He chokes down the visceral reaction he has to anyone who has dared to even look sideways at his Marie, let alone this guy, this monster who had forced screams from her lungs.  His growl rips through the room anew, but he pushes the animal down, ignores its fury, and forces himself to examine the photo.  
  
Sabretooth’s jowly face looks older in death, almost unthreatening robbed of its perpetual snarl.  He is still a giant of a man, thick, corded muscles heavy on oversized bones, and maybe they’d shaved his head for the autopsy or maybe the mouldy rug had actually had a haircut, but it doesn’t matter because he’s dead.  Never a threat again, and Logan should be wondering who the hell managed to take out the only other superhealer he knew, and not thinking about how fucking vulnerable he looked without that ridiculous mane of hair.  
  
The urge to rip the world apart howls up from the animal, the rush of emotion knocking out half the control mechanisms he and Xavier have spent years developing.  Logan gropes for calm, for centre, but all he finds is rage.  Horror.  A sense of loss he doesn’t understand.  
  
And then a door swings open.  
  
_Stay close, brother,_ mud squelching under their boots, and the blank stares of death from all sides.  The stutter of machine guns, the silent victory of the sniper, their result the same, bodies stacking up around them, enemy, yes, but mostly their own men.  Too many of their own men, picked off one by one, unable to find the ghosts in the night the way he could, Victor could.  
  
His brother’s shrug, concerned solely for their increasingly untenable position.  Logan’s entire being rebelling at the order to evacuate, refusing to abandon them, but the bastard knows him, snaps _that’s an order, soldier_ and _they called you a freak_.  
  
And they did, they did, but look where that got them, all dead now, all except for the boy, skunking up the place with his terror.  His eyes had been huge in that smooth, beardless face, innocent even with death raining down about them, trusting and hopeful in a way that broke him.  We’re not like you, he wants to scream.  There’s no use hoping – he hates your kind.  
  
But it’s not Victor the kid is looking at with all that expectation, and he’s weak, so very weak, but he knew that already.  He’s coming with us and the set of his brother’s mouth was pure contempt, and he spouts some poisonous shit, same old, same old.  
  
_Got a pretty mouth_ and _maybe he can earn his keep_ spins into _touch him and I’ll kill you_ and they’re back on familiar ground, _runt_ and _animal_ and _bitch_ and _psycho_.  
  
Kid had piped up then, broken out of his terror to ask something about the evac plan, smart little sucker, even then.  Scared out of his brain, but still thinking, that baby soldier.  Got him out, too, young Leroy Jethro Gibbs – what had he been when they’d endured Nam’s biggest fuckup?  Eighteen? Twenty?  
  
‘Cause the man watching him now has silver hair and weathered skin, and a weariness in his eyes that suggests a lot of years of living.  Mature now, if not inching towards old age, Logan thinks sourly.  Still a soldier, back straight, body poised, but there’s years of experience in the way he stills the young woman’s arm.  His carefully manufactured calm.  
  
The steely weight of his regard, a living thing in the room, watching, waiting for his reaction. To … the picture.  Of his brother, Victor.  
  
Dead.  
  
Huh.  
  
Probably just as well he hadn’t killed the bastard himself.  
  
Another door slams back, and – fuck.   He’d wanted to.  Tried, back when his memories were intact. Brotherhood, it turns out, is less than it’s cracked up to be.  
  
Suddenly, he doesn’t feel so bad.  
  
“Didn’t know I had a brother,” he admits.  “Got some holes in my memory.”  
  
Gibbs blinks, but doesn’t quite manage to conceal his surprise. Makes a non-committal sound that is probably cop speak for ‘well that sounds like bullshit’.  
  
“Sometimes things shake out, though.  How’ve you been, private?”  It’s kinda hard to retract the claws casually, but he does his best.  Even leaves his hand there to shake.  
  
Gibbs signals a standdown to his jumpy partner and steps forward to shake his hand.  Looks almost glad to be doing it, something like a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.  
  
“Made gunnery sergeant myself before I moved over to NCIS,” he says casually.  “Been a few years.”  
  
“Well done, Gunney.  I’m not surprised.  Not sure how much help I’m gonna be, though.”  How exactly did you tell someone you couldn’t remember what had happened, or when you saw each other last?  That he’d just triggered more memories than five years of intense work with the world’s best mind manipulator?  
  
“Not killing us is probably a good start,” Gibbs says drily, then gestures at the table nearby.  “Can we talk this through?”  
  
“Sounds like an idea,” Marie smiles, folding his naked hand into her gloved ones.  “Come sit, sugar.”  
  
He lets her pull him over to the table, then keeps hold of her hand as they settle into their chairs opposite the two agents.  Her fingers are tracing over the veins in his hand, chasing away the last of the adrenaline coursing through his system with the delicacy of her touch.  Her scent  - warm, safe, home – closes the deal, sending his feral self slinking back to the cosy little den it inhabits deep inside his abused psyche.  Logan envies him that haven, sometimes – curled up snug with sweet memories of their girl while he gets to deal with the uglier stuff out here.  
  
Like the autopsy photo sitting on the desk between them.  
  
“Last time I saw Sabretooth was about two years ago.  His boss had pulled some shit my boss disagreed with, so we, uh, opened negotiations.  My claws against his teeth.”  
  
Gibbs’ offsider raises an eyebrow, the first sign of real emotion the dark girl – David, now he thinks about it - has allowed to register on her face.  She’s an enigma, that one, odd accent and that strangely neutral scent, more gun oil than anything else, human things jammed way down.  . “Who won?”  
  
Logan chuckles darkly as he tries to puzzle her out. “Two superhealers against each other?  No such thing as winning, just who gets the jump first.  That time, it was us.”  
  
“Somebody certainly managed to ‘get the jump’, as you say, this time.  And they knew how to find something from which he didn’t heal.”  
  
David’s assessing gaze shifts to Rogue and the logic scorches his synapses with all the subtlety of a falling tree.  Rogue’s their suspect.  Of course.  She’s the only person who’s ever been capable of taking him out, after all.  
  
His alarm outweighs his sense of self-preservation.  
  
“Like I’d let my girl have anything to do with that mangy bastard,” he hisses, then closes his eyes as Rogue’s caress becomes a tight, unforgiving grip on his wrist.  
  
“I’m sorry, sugar.  Would you care to repeat that?” she asks, warning dripping from every syllable.  
  
He shakes his head at his own stupidity, but can’t bring himself to repent.  “He likes to make pretty girls scream, baby.  And not in the good way.”    
  
Agony crawls out of the void first, and then – their names.  Rose.  Kayla.  Memories of a sweetly pretty redhead, and then half a century later, a vibrant native girl, their warmth soon shoved aside by the nightmare of their bodies, broken and bloody, his brother – his own brother – standing over them, lip curled in a sneer that reveals bloody fangs. Don’t we share, brother? Everything we have?  
  
“No.  No.”  Logan slams his fists into the table, using every last ounce of his self control to repress the urge to pop the claws.  “You’re not going anywhere near him, Marie!” he roars, feeling it sweep over him, that urge to drag her back to his den and hide.  It’s their one bone of contention, his ferocious over-protectiveness, and he knows she’s all grown up now and not a child to do his bidding, not that she was ever one for obedience, and this has no place their relationship.  He knows that and usually he can lock it down, but … not right now.  
  
Rogue rescues him, or maybe it’s Marie.  Doesn’t matter – his sweet child bride lives inside his kickass action hero of a wife, and that’s how they like it.  Marie is his, and his alone, but when she has to, she can still come out swinging.  Just with a different set of tools, is all.    
  
Marie twists out of her seat to crawl into his lap, her touch pulling him back into the room.  The delicious softness of her curves has already vanquished the threat of his unruly claws, his hands finding better things to do as her body presses into his, one hand stroking down his chest, the other curling around his jaw as she drags his chin towards her to catch his line of sight.  “I’m right here, and I’m safe.  You keep me safe,” she insists, voice low.    
  
The possessiveness still rioting in his veins screams for proof of that, hands roaming her body, nose buried in her hair, filling his senses with her.  He wants to bite down, taste her skin, and is pulling her hair back to do exactly that when some idiot clears his throat, loud and unimpressed.  
  
Rogue doesn’t let him look away just yet.   “He’s dead, sugar.  He can’t hurt me – can’t hurt anyone, ever again.”  
  
“Good,” he grunts, not even thinking to lower his voice.  “He would’a come for you, eventually.”  
  
His hands clench convulsively on her hips, his brain struggling to process the enormity of it, how lucky they’d been.  If he’d known, he’d have never – what?  Let them get near her?  Let them take her?  Not like he hadn’t fought them with everything he had, no matter what he’d been telling himself at the time.  She’s just a kid, you’d do it for anyone, leaving is the right thing to do … anything to escape the attraction he couldn’t squelch, and the way she used to look at him, everything she wanted visible in those warm whiskey eyes.  
  
He’d spent three years avoiding the mansion, looping in and out in increasingly small circles until he’d given in to the fact he could never really leave.  He hadn’t even finished parking his bike when she’d arrived in a whirlwind of long hair and irresistible joy, so happy to see him he couldn’t bear to push her away when she threw herself in his arms.  Then she’d lifted her head and they were kissing, long, wet kisses that left him dizzy and desperate to discover just how long he could last before her mutation claimed him.  
  
Not very long, it turned out, so they’d moved their reunion to his bed, where he could at least collapse without putting the whole mansion on red alert.  “Stay,” he’d croaked, and she had, and they’d been together ever since, more than five years now.  
  
Bile twists in his belly as his mind tortures him with all the times Sabretooth could have taken her.  He might as well have painted a target on her back, Logan thinks viciously, rolling out of their bed to do battle with the Brotherhood time after time after time.  And yet … his brother had never made it personal.  Never come after her specifically.  It was almost as if Victor had forgotten his sick little game.  Maybe they’d fucked with his brain along the way too.  Or maybe there was just no fun in it for him if Logan didn’t know it was his big brother monstering his girl.  
  
He’ll never know, now.  Never be able to figure out why he’d left them alone, or how he feels about that.  There’s a part of him (that kid, maybe, who’d grown up idolising his only playmate, blissfully unaware the groundsman’s son was his blood too) that yearns to believe Sabretooth had put aside his grudge, maybe mellowed with time, but then he remembers those yellow eyes sneering at him, malevolent, as he dragged her out of Magneto’s machine that day.  They’d been empty of everything except hate.    
  
So why is he thinking about that kid, the one who’d dragged him out the house that day, still catatonic and staring at the bone spikes, still covered in his father’s blood?  Or the wars they’d fought, one filthy trench after another in that monotonous parade of years?  Shivering, naked, in front of Stryker, scribbling his name on a sheet of paper that had more blacked out sections than text. Had the monster been born or made?  And what did that say about him?  
  
Logan’s roar fills the room, bounces off the ceiling, and the claws spring out again, stabbing, rending, slicing.  He shouldn’t have to look at his brother’s dead eyes.  Shouldn’t have to know about the things his brother did.  Shouldn’t have to sit here, racking his brain over stupid questions he didn’t know the answers to.  
  
He should know the answers.  He’s so damn sick of questions without answers.  
Best stop freaking out the investigators then, a wry voice that sounds a lot like Rogue’s pipes up inside his head.  He turns to raise a brow at her – not entirely impossible she’s borrowed a little something from the Professor or Jeannie – but she just stares at him, clearly gobsmacked by his little tantrum.  
  
Oops.  
  
“Looks like I owe Chuck another table,” he grunts, resigning himself to some grovelling.  Then looks up, cringing inside, to apologise to Gibbs and his offsider. “Sorry about your photo.”  
  
“We’ve got others,” the former Marine shrugs.  “Sorry if it came as a shock.  I didn’t realise you had – memory issues.”  
  
“Some,” he allows.  “I can tell you that we didn’t do this, though.  Me or Rogue.  And I doubt she’s ever been on a ship.”  
  
“Who’d have wanted to kill him?”  
  
Rogue snorts.  “Not a short list.  Anyone who’d ever met the guy, basically.  And that’s just personal, leaving aside the sort of things the Brotherhood do to people.”  
  
“Tell us about the Brotherhood,” Agent David says, and – hell no.  He’s not listening to this.  
  
“Fill ‘em in, then meet me in the Danger Room,” he barks, so fiercely that Rogue shoots straight back to pissed off.  _Good_ , his animal purrs when her jaw slams shut on a retort, fists clenching underneath the nearly destroyed table.  _It’s much more fun when you’re angry, darlin’._  
  
“Of course, sugar.  Anything you say,” she smiles, deadly, and – yup, he’s in for it, alright. 


End file.
